Movie Review: Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs 2

After the disastrous food storm in the first film, Flint and his friends are forced to leave the town. Flint accepts the invitation from his idol Chester V to join The Live Corp Company, which has been tasked to clean the island, and where the best inventors in the world create technologies for the betterment of mankind. When Flint discovers that his machine still operates and now creates mutant food beasts like living pickles, hungry tacodiles, shrimpanzees and apple pie-thons, he and his friends must return to save the world. 

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 follows the continuing adventures of inventor Flint Lockwood (and friends) – after his first high profile creation, the FLDSMDFR (short for Flint Lockwood Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator), left his hometown of Swallow Falls covered in oversized pieces of food. In order to begin reclaiming the town from giant donuts, titular meatballs, and other sizable (but delicious) edibles, Flint (Bill Hader), along with friends Sam Sparks (Anna Faris), Brent McHale (Andy Samberg), Earl Devereaux (Terry Crews), Manny (Benjamin Bratt), Steve (Neil Patrick Harris), and his father, Tim Lockwood (James Caan), team-up to start the recovery effort – until genius scientist, and Flint’s boyhood hero, Chester V arrives on the scene.

Chester V informs the citizens of the Swallow Falls that his company, Live Corp, will be handling clean up duties – offering to relocate the townspeople until their island is back to normal. However, Chester V neglects to tell Flint that the FLDSMDFR is still active – this time creating sentient (and dangerous) food/animal hybrids. Then, when an elite Live Corp team goes missing on the island, Chester V must break his silence and enlist Flint’s assistance to journey back to Swallow Falls and shutdown the FLDSMDFR for good.

For Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, series writer/helmers Phil Lord and Chris Miller (21 Jump Street and The Lego Movie) handed directorial duties over to Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs‘ head of story and story artist, Chris Pearn and Cody Cameron, respectively. Instead of a more traditional sequel route, rehashing the plot of the first film on a larger scale as the FLDSMDFR extends its reach from Swallow Falls to full-on world domination, Pearn and Cameron opted to take the narrative in a radically different (and significantly more creative) direction – a Jurassic Park-like adventure full of imaginative food creatures as well as, subsequently, plenty of tongue-in-cheek word play. As a result, while Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 doesn’t quite live up to the high bar set in the first installment (a film that offered plenty of humor and heart for adults as well as the juice box crowd), the sequel is a worthy follow-up, successfully iterating on the core formula while exploring a handful of fresh ideas.

As with most animated comedies, there are some pretty heavy-handed life lessons that are injected into the main storyline of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 – which, in several cases, follow familiar tropes through to predictable conclusions. The original film was a bit more subtle with thematic subtext and while the sequel’s penchant for hammering ruminations on friendship and self-interest, among other topics, won’t affect the enjoyment of younger viewers, older moviegoers will, very likely, sense that Cloudy 2 is operating at a slightly lower “reading level.” For that reason, some audience members that were impressed by the first movie’s ability to effortlessly traverse age demographics, might be less enthusiastic about the amount of ambition and accessibility on display in Pearn and Cameron’s sequel.

Still, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 is far from a shameless and hollow cash grab – as the main storyline, especially the “foodimal” creations, provide plenty of guilty laughs while the juxtaposition between Flint Lockwood and Chester V offer worthwhile commentary on a culture of obsessive innovation and personal isolation. Additionally, the movie includes a number of subtle and some not-so-subtle nods to its genre inspirations – such as King Kong, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and, as mentioned, the Jurassic Park series – which add an extra layer of wit and homages for longtime film fans.

The majority of the primary cast return to voice their respective characters in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 - with the exception of Terry Crews who replaces Mr. T as the voice of fan-favorite crime fighter Earl Devereaux. Newcomers Will Forte (who is getting an upgrade as Chester V after voicing Joe Towne in the first film) as well as Kristen Schaal (Chester V’s  orangutan companion) are solid additions to the cast and any viewers saddened by the absence of Bruce Campbell’s Mayor Shelbourne can take comfort that Neil Patrick Harris is back delivering one-word dialogue as Steve the monkey.

Of course, the real stars of the Cloudy 2 are the previously mentioned “foodimals” which, in addition to countless others, include Barry the Strawberry (voiced by Cameron), cheespiders, shrimpanzees, watermelophants, tacodile supremes, hippotatomuses, bananostriches, as well as PB and jellyfish. Moviegoers who can overlook the obvious gimmick at play, will find the implementations of various food-animal hybrids to be engaging and well-realized – supplying many of the film’s best laughs.

While Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 might not deliver the same cross-generational appeal as the first film, it’s a worthy sequel that smartly iterates on the core storyline with a new and entertaining direction. The foodimals will keep members of the film’s kid-friendly demographic entertained and tongue-in-cheek social satire provide some decent chuckles for parents (as well as older fans of the prior installment). In general, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 doesn’t taste quite as fresh as the original recipe but the film offers more than just re-heated leftovers – with another funny and entertaining adventure that justifies a second helping of Flint Lockwood and friends.

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Dead Space: Aftermath

When contact with the USG Ishimura and the Aegis VII colony is lost, the Concordance Extraction Corporation sends the ship USG O'Bannon to investigate. But the corporation loses contact with the O'Bannon as well.

The Marine battleship Abraxis portals to and docks with the O'Bannon. Five marines board the ship and see mutilated bodies. Their scanners detect four people still alive: Nicholas Kuttner, a security officer; Alejandro Borgas, an engineer; Nolan Stross, chief science officer; and Isabella Cho, chief medical officer. Kuttner starts shooting at the marines, wounding one. The marines incapacitate them and take them to the Abraxis. The Abraxis destroys the O'Bannon and portals out of the Aegis system. The four find themselves in a holding cell on the Abraxis, heading to the Sprawl, a station built on a shard of Titan. The head interrogator is told by the Overseer he has seven hours to get information from the survivors.

Kuttner is interrogated first. They use his fear of being burned alive to get him to co-operate. Kuttner's daughter, Vivian, was killed prior to the mission. He was in a conference room with Cho, Stross, a soldier named Rin and their leader Sergenko. Borgas enters the room with his 19-year-old cousin Noah and Omar, a Unitologist. All three were picked up from the Sprawl. Captain Campbell enters and explains that crews will stabilize the gravity on Aegis VII, then dismisses the engineers. Campbell explains that Kuttner's crew are to bring back pieces of the Marker, which are worth millions of credits per kilo. The crew and engineers land on Aegis VII, which has become unstable. While the engineers work the gravity stabilizer, Kuttner's crew split up. Kuttner finds a shard of the Marker which has a terrible effect on him. He sees a vision of his daughter. His hallucination of the crew as monsters trying to hurt her causes him to attack the engineers. He kills Noah and causes the stabilizer to malfunction, and his teammates tie him up in the shuttle.

After giving his account, the restraints are removed. Kuttner kills several crew members and marines before he is shot. He sees his daughter walk through an airlock. As the marines attempt to grab him, he opens the airlock, killing himself and the marines.

They bring in Borgas, who explains the crew made it to the shuttle, but Rin, Sergenko and Omar were killed. Borgas was forced to crash land the shuttle onto the O'Bannon. Aegis VII explodes seconds before the ship can jump out of the system. The debris causes severe damage to the ShockPoint Drive. Borgas, enraged by his cousin's death, demands to know the importance of the shard. When the captain explains the shard's monetary value, Borgas assaults him. After Cho calms him down, he follows the captain's order to fix the drive.

After giving his account, the lead interrogator assures Borgas he will go home. He has Borgas killed. He sends in Stross. Stross' account begins after getting the shard on the ship. Stross was on the O'Bannon with his wife and infant son, but his duties were taking a toll on their relationship. He studies the shard, which begins to affect him. He sees symbols everywhere and begins to obsess over the Marker. He explains to the captain how the Marker was possibly designed by a higher power; and how it restructures DNA, improving it. To prove this theory, he takes a body from the morgue and exposes it to the shard. The corpse transforms into a Necromorph and begins killing and transforming crew members throughout the ship. Stross runs to his living quarters and kills his wife and son, thinking they are Necromorphs. The head interrogator, realizing that Stross can communicate with the Marker, has him stored.

When Cho gives her account, it is discovered that she was having an affair with Stross, and she had fallen in love with him. She noticed changes in him after he began to study the shard. After having sex with him in the lab, they have an argument and he tells her to leave. After checking up on Kuttner, she and several other doctors arrive at the morgue. They find the bodies gone and several doctors killed. One of the bodies turns into a Necromorph, causing the group to flee. She releases Kuttner, who kills the Necromorph. She goes to Stross' living quarters, and finds his dead wife and son. They eventually meet up with Captain Campbell, who is fighting the Necromorphs with the security team. The Necromorphs overwhelm the last of the security, and the Captain, Kuttner, Cho and Stross flee into the vents. They make it to Stross' lab, where they meet with Borgas, and two officers from the bridge. Stross explains that destroying the shard could stop the Necromorphs. Borgas says that throwing it into the portal drive could not only destroy it, but restart the drive. With weapons made by Borgas, they head to engineering. Debris from the planet causes a hull breach, damaging the outer door control for engineering. Captain Campbell sacrifices himself to seal the door manually. The four survivors battle the Necromorphs to get to the portal drive. When Stross refuses to throw the shard into the drive, Cho does it. The drive's energy destroys the shard, which causes all the Necromorphs to liquefy.

After giving her account, Cho is informed that the Abraxis has reached the Sprawl. Cho surmises that her superiors are aware of the effects of the Marker and are using those exposed as human guinea pigs. The Overseer accompanies Cho to the Sprawl and has the interrogator and his assistant killed. The Overseer offers Cho a position as head of the project, but Cho refuses after seeing what her superiors have done. She is lobotomised.

The Overseer and his assistant watch a news report where Cho is accused of being a terrorist responsible for the Ishimura, Aegis VII colony, and O'Bannon disasters. They then discuss studying Stross, highlighting their luck in finding two people who have come into contact with the Marker. They proceed to store him in the lab where, in the slot next to him, is the other person - the crazed engineer that they found floating in a shuttle weeks ago who was responsible for destroying Aegis VII. The name of the engineer, Isaac Clarke, is then seen on a holographic monitor, marking the beginning of Dead Space 2.

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DESPICABLE ME 2

Steve Carell is back in the role of everyone's favorite villain-turned-father-figure Gru. Let me start off by saying that I love Carell and I love the Gru accent and I like very much the first Despicable Me. This time around, Gru has been conscripted by the Anti-Villain League to find the villain responsible for trying to melt the polar ice-caps! Kristen Wiig joins the cast as Lucy, a green-as-grass agent at the AVL who ends up partnered with Gru for the duration of the mission. The character is a perfectly acceptable inclusion, but Wiig's performance is just annoying as all hell; I really was disappointed that she gave such a bad performance, alternating overdoing it and sounding almost bored. Jason Segel not returning was somewhat disappointing also, as I'm a huge fan of his work.

Gru's three daughters were the pivotal point of the first movie, and that's what gave the movie its charm. This theme of a bad guy being a good dad doesn't completely carry through into the second movie, although there are a couple great subplots involving the girls, despite them being common cinema tropes (IE the oldest getting a crush on a boy and Gru being uncomfortable with the idea). The opening scene in particular was a great way to reintroduce the family, and set up the secondary premise of the film: Gru finding a woman to love and be a mother figure to the girls.

This is what led to the most emotionally charged sequences, especially between Gru and Agnes, the youngest (like when Gru told her to pretend she had a mom for her performance at the upcoming Mother's Day pageant, and she responded with "I can do that! I do that all the time!" My heart melted). Unfortunately, these beautiful moments are completely undercut by the majority of the script. This is Illumination Entertainment, the same studio that made The Lorax and Hop, so I'm not expecting super compelling narratives or dialogue. However, there were far too many jokes that were either too obvious or badly delivered (anything Kristen Wiig said, for example). The character development for Gru also felt strange to me; the idea that he would suddenly be so willing to work for the Anti-Villain League after a life of being a villain didn't quite make sense. The first movie had a good balance between slapstick Looney Tunes comedy and well written humor and story, so it's disappointing that the humor here just wasn't at the same level. I'll be so bold as to say that there were moments when the movie was walking that dangerous Shrek the Third line where it started to feel like the writers were trying way too hard. Did I mention that I hate Shrek the Third like I hate getting mosquito bites on a sunburn?

For all the shortcomings of the script, the movie does have some redeeming qualities, the first of which is the absolutely gorgeous animation. At the forefront of my memory is a first person perspective sequence in front of Gru's house that is absolutely exquisite. Animation technology has made great strides in the past five years, and it shows. There's a moment near the end that takes place out at sea, and the water effects on the ocean's surface and the sunset reflecting off of it are approaching the Uncanny Valley, and yet still fit the cartoon world at the same time; I am reminded of Marlin's scene looking for the boat at the beginning of Finding Nemo.

Also a huge boon for the movie is the ever-adorable Minion horde. These guys are back and more hilarious than ever. The Minions manage to be a critical part of the story while also providing most of the movie's sight gags, leaving the smarter humor, where available, to the main characters, which I find to be a clever deflection. The Minions are well deserving of the attention they've been getting.

I'm a musician myself so I'm always devoting a portion of my brain to absorbing a movie's soundtrack. The music in a movie has the power to steer your emotions without you realizing that it's happening, so it's very important that the musical cues at the critical moments are memorable. I was sort of underwhelmed with this soundtrack. It had all the necessary returning secret agent style themes and motives that were in the first movie, and admittedly those are a whole lot of fun. It's the contextual emotional one-off movements that more often than not felt generic and not particularly moving, with one notable exception during a Lucy scene near the end of the film; I'll leave the specifics for you to see the movie. It's just disappointing to me when a movie's score doesn't pack the right emotional punch.

 Despicable Me 2 is a fun film with several great jokes that are drowned out by an excess of bad jokes. The story had a lot of potential but didn't quite hit the mark. It sounds like a decent premise on paper, but the execution just didn't pack the punch of the first movie. I feel like all the heart the franchise had to offer was offered up in the first movie. It didn't quite feel like a cash-in on the franchise, but it wasn't quite up to par either. Some bad performances from certain voice-actors named Kristen Wiig really removed me from the experience, and the story felt a little contrived at times.

It's definitely worth seeing, but don't pop the extra money for 3D; the beautiful animation will actually benefit from watching the movie without the 3D glasses dimming the image. I love 3D, and I have a 3DTV in my room. I just think the effect does more for live action movies than it does for super vivid colorful animation. The depth of field is fun but I don't think that its worth detracting brightness and sharpness from the vivid images created by animators.

A very funny movie.. It's good for childrens. My niece enjoy this movie.
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EPIC

After her mother dies, teenager Mary Katherine, aka M.K. (voiced by Amanda Seyfried), goes to live with her estranged father, Bomba (Jason Sudeikis), a disgraced professor who's convinced that the forests are inhabited by tiny creatures, including armed warrior guards. M.K., like her late mother, thinks her obsessed father is mentally ill ... until she witnesses the death of the tiny forest queen Tara (Beyonce Knowles), who entrusts her with the care of a magical bulb that must bloom in that very night's moonlight. Shrunken in the process, M.K. is confused but quickly realizes that her father is right, thanks to the head of the Leafmen, Ronin (Colin Farrell), and his rebellious protege, Nod (Josh Hutcherson), who guard M.K. and the bulb in the hopes of keeping it away from the forest's archenemy, Mandrake (Christoph Waltz), leader of the Boggans -- nefarious creatures who cause rot and destruction. Because if Mandrake and the Boggans can capture the bulb, the forest will turn into a barren wasteland.

Visually, EPIC captures the beauty of the lush forest in which the majority of the characters live: the greens and browns and vibrant flower palettes are beautiful, and the way that light and dark (the Boggans make everything an ash gray) are used is inspired. The voice actors are all fittingly cast, particularly the comic relief provided by slug-snail pals Mub and Grub (Aziz Ansari and Chris O'Dowd). Farrell is exceptionally believable as a stoic warrior, as is Hutcherson as an orphaned teen who's a gifted fighter but who has trouble following directions. The weak link in casting is Waltz, whose unique Austrian accent works scarily well in live action but has less impact when he's in animated form.

Plot wise, there's also something missing from the story. Epic feels overlong and overly reminiscent of several other animated movies, like The Secret World of Arrietty, Happy Feet, and Antz. The romantic elements seem unnecessary as well, with M.K. and Nod falling into infatuation a bit too quickly and without any of the sweet banter that makes movies like Shrek and Tangled so good. Despite these shortcomings, the movie is just funny and exciting enough to keep kids and parents entertained. But Epic never quite lives up to its riskily self-indulgent title.


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Rise of the Guradians

Rise of the Guardians is a fantastic holiday super hero movie for the whole family.

Rise of the Guardians is a super hero movie for kids. Unlike most Christmas movies, Guardians takes place during Easter, and features holiday characters from the whole year..

The movie is one of the most beautifully animated of the year, and combines high-paced action with a nice, touching story of belief in the power of fun and wonder over fear. In many ways, despite its kid-oriented, somewhat silly premise, it’s an important movie. After all, we spend much of our time haunted by various bogey-men; it’s good to see films that show how weak fear really is.

The central protagonist of this tale is Jack Frost, a Puckish prankster whose powers appear to be confined to giving children snow days. Nobody believes in him, and thus nobody can see him despite his attempts to bring children fun and joy.

When the villain, Pitch Black (also known as the Bogey Man) returns to snuff out belief in Santa and the other Guardians, Jack Frost is promoted by the Man in the Moon to the team of super hero Guardians whose primary job is to protect children. Joining up with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and the Sandman, Jack Frost learns a few things about himself, his past, and his purpose.

Directed by Peter Ramsay, the film is an adaptation of the books by William Joyce. It’s funny, exciting, and its message is never too cheesy or over-the-top. My five-year-old daughter loved it, though I think kids quite a bit older would also enjoy the film. Certainly I did, so we know the 31-year-old child demographic is in good hands.

This is one I didn’t get to until the 3D version had already left theaters, which is a shame. As much as I don’t care for 3D, I can see how Rise of the Guardians would have been a really fun 3D experience. Then again, I suspect the 3D version sacrificed some of the lush color that made the animation so fantastic.

Dreamworks often stoops to cheap humor and generic storytelling, so in some ways I came to this movie expecting something more generic. Perhaps the lower expectations helped, but I really was pleasantly surprised.

True, Pitch Black is something of a Loki figure, and at times I half expected Thor to come thundering in to take him off for judgment in Asgard. But the villain’s powers—the power of fear and nightmares—worked tremendously well. Better, in many respects, than aliens from another planet.

This was so great! This movie will love of all especially the kids!
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